Permafrost thaw

What it shows

Every road and pipeline on Arctic permafrost, coloured by how fast the ground under it is warming. Zoomed out, the thaw class of the ground above 45°N; zoomed in, the roads and pipelines in view are fetched from OpenStreetMap and each segment takes the class of the 1 km pixel under it, summed into kilometres per class.

Where the data comes from

Permafrost Thaw Index, Copernicus/ESSD 2026 (Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.19148960, CC-BY 4.0), 1 km/px; roads and pipelines from OpenStreetMap via Overpass, live.

Reading the map

Blues are cold ground, yellows and oranges cool ground, reds warm ground; the darker within a family, the stronger the warming trend. Deep crimson is permafrost in isolated patches, thawing now.

Units Two-digit thaw class: first digit ground temperature (1 cold < -3 °C, 2 cool, 3 warm > -1.5 °C), second the 25-year warming trend (1 none, 2 one metric, 3 both); 40 isolated patches already thawing. Kilometres per class.

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Other layers in ground

• Terrain
• Tectonics
• The wires
• What is here
• Glacial lake floods